Houston's Best Bets This Weekend: Hispanic Heritage Month Has Landed

Hispanic Heritage Month is officially here with the official day kicking off this Saturday. Aside from El Grito that is well known and heard every 16th of September, celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month with the perfectly timed Texas Taco Music Fest and a trip to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston for a lesson in Mexican cinema with Tales of Mexico. Keep reading for more of this weekend's best bets.

Remember when Nickelodeon had the raddest cartoons and MTV played music videos in the middle of the day, instead of just in the wee hours of the night. Or how about when Scream came out in '96 and all the coolest babes wanted to be Neve Campbell? If you remember the decade fondly and vividly than this nights for you. After hosting an '80s themed trivia night it was only right St. Arnold do it for the '90s. As per any party aesthetic, costumes are encourage, food will be on hand and Nirvana will be heard. For information, call 713-686-9494 or visit saintarnold.com. Free.

Poor Elwood P. Dowd. They all thought he was crazy because he was friends with an invisible, 6-foot-tall rabbit. His character is coming back for the kickoff to A.D. Players’ upcoming season with Mary Chase’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvey. The show ran 1,775 performances between 1944 and 1949 before becoming a blockbuster movie staring James Stewart. Kevin Dean reprises the role of Elwood and tells us “What’s interesting is it’s a religious and spiritual play told in terms of farce. It’s about a man who has such affection for mankind in general, and when you have someone like that, strange and miraculous things happen.” A.D. Players will also be sharing free tickets for flood victims and first responders of Harvey; along with three Sunday Family Day Matinees with activities in the lobby for kids ages five to eleven. Harvey for Harvey will also be donating 20 percent of all total proceeds to local disaster relief. For information, call 713-526-2721 or visit adplayers.org. $15 to $20.

Learn about the official Dia de los Muertos flower, the marigold, at Casa Ramirez.

Casa Ramirez is known for its culturally relevant art, its gallery and its longstanding relationship with Houstonians. With that in mind it only makes sense to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month with Macario and Chrissie Ramirez in their home-felt gallery. Drop by for lessons on Dia de los Muertos, and altar making for our loved ones passed. For information, call 713-880-2420 or visit facebook.com/Casa-Ramirez-FOLKART-Gallery-76060185584/. Free.

Tacos on tacos is always a good thing.

Photo by Dizzy Kaktus

Texas Taco Music Fest at Discovery Green Saturday, noon 1500 McKinney

Tacos, also known as one of Texas' main food groups, deserves its own festival, and it's got it. This weekend at Discovery Green Texas tacos and Texas music will come together for one Houston's favorite festivals, the Texas Taco Music Fest. This years festival includes local music, a kids play area and for the first time a performance from the Danzantes de Voladeros de Papantla, Mexico. These aerial acrobats are known for their dizzying stunts based off their one lean apparatus at frighteningly high heights, catch them while they're in town and get a glimpse at one of Mexico's most loved attractions. For information, call 301-984-6644 or visit texastacomusicfest.com. $12 to $90.

Set in a factory in 1905, Maxim Gorky’s Enemies shows a Russian society as more than just landed gentry and peasants, but also the increasingly disgruntled middle class. Factory workers are demanding changes of the two owners, one of whom is sympathetic to them; the other maintains a hard line. “It’s a great actors’ piece. There’s lots of characters in it,” says Rebecca Greene Udden, the director of this play and artistic director of Main Street Theater. It was precisely for that reason that the University of Houston couldn’t tackle it by itself, she says, and Rob Shimko, director of UH’s School of Theatre & Dance, suggested it to her. Besides the large cast (which does include some UH students), there are a number of “mature roles” in the play, she says. For information, call 713-524-3622 or visit mainstreettheater.com. $36 to $45.

The Contemporary Arts Museum welcomes its newest buzz-worthy exhibit, Telepathic Improvisation. Created by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, it brings new moving-image work, sculptures, speech, gesture, music, light and smoke to interpret composer Pauline Oliveros’s 1974 score of the same title. It bridges together seemingly different walks of life with specific moments of leftist protest, queer S&M club life, acts of surveillance, and fantasies of relations between humans and nonhuman objects. CAMH Curator Dean Daderko says the “film asks viewers to consider how political and aesthetic ideas can move us from protest into resistance and change.” For information, call 713-284-8250 or visit camh.org. Free.

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Tales of Mexico (La habitación) is a collaborative project made up of Mexico's best in the rising cinema scene; the film is made up of eight episodes with each directed by a different talent. The film tells the story of how one apartment building can tell the tale of history spanning over the 100 years as its inhabitants occupied it. Covering the years as far back as the anti-Chinese immigration movement of the late 1800s to the recent stories of poverty and Mexico's drug stricken streets. Watch the apartment building personify history and share the evolution of Mexico. For information, call 713-639-7300 or visit mfah.org. $7 to $9.

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